Records
A record is one subject’s file in your study: every dictionary field’s value, plus its surveys, notes and activity, in one workspace. Records are what a study is built around — everything else exists to define them, fill them in, or read them back.
What a record represents
That’s your decision, and a study can hold more than one kind:
- A person you’ve enrolled. Participant records — and member records for your own team — are created automatically when someone joins, one each. You never create these by hand, and they can’t be deleted while the person is part of the study.
- A thing. Free-standing records belong to nobody: samples, organs, devices, sites, cases, imported cohorts — anything you’re collecting data about that doesn’t log in. You create them yourself (Records → New), your team enters data against them, and surveys can be sent about them.
Free-standing records are a first-class way to run a study, not a leftover. A study whose records are all samples is a complete study; it simply has no one to enrol.
They’re also the only kind you can delete, and you can duplicate any record into a new free-standing one — every value is copied.
The record workspace
Opening a record gives you tabs:
- Overview — who or what this record is, created and updated dates.
- Data — the values. Two views: the full record editor over your whole dictionary, and the form view, which renders the record through an audience’s profile form — useful for seeing exactly what the participant sees. Saves are all-or-nothing, and validation from your dictionary applies here too.
- Surveys — responses linked to this record, and the place to send a survey directly to this record.
- Notes — free-text notes from your team.
- Activity — a timeline of what changed.
Filling records in
Record data arrives three ways: onboarding flows write form-step answers into the joiner’s record; participants maintain their own details through their profile form; and your team edits any record directly in the Data tab. For free-standing records the third route is the main one — there’s no one else to fill them in — so it’s worth setting up the free-standing records form to make that data entry quick. See Forms: views of your data.
Search and export
The records list supports search, filtering by type (participant / member / free-standing), and CSV export of the whole list — do an export before any destructive change.